The Problem of Normativity in

Kants Philosophy of Logic

Rebecca Victoria Millsop
April 16, 2010
Submitted in partial fulllment
of the requirements for Honors in Philosophy
at the University of California, Berkeley
I want to express my gratitude to Professor John MacFarlane for being my advisor for this
project; working with him has been an invaluable philosophical experience. I also want to
thank the following individuals for their sustained support, advice, and comments on previous
drafts of this essay: Gus Holcomb, Eugene Chislenko, Yuan Wu, Laura Davis, Justin Bledin,
Nathana OBrien, Devin Rusky, Lara Krisst, Paolo Mancosu, Branden Fitelson, Hannah Gins-
borg, Daniel Warren, Markus Kohl, and my mom. I would also like to thank the audience in
Branden Fitelsons Logic, Formal Methods, and Epistemology seminar, as well as Berkeleys
Undergraduate Philosophy Forum.
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 A Law as a Norm 4
3 Kants General Logic 7
3.1 Abstraction and Necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3.2 The Constitutive Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.3 The Normative Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4 The Moral Law and the Laws of Logic 22
4.1 Both Normative and Non-Normative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.2 The Two Standpoints and Relational Normativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4.3 Analogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
4.4 Pure and Applied as Noumenal and Phenomenal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5 Conclusion 38
A Appendix: Kants Transcendental Idealism 40
A.1 Cognitive Faculties and the Discursivity Thesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
A.2 The Two-Aspects Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
1 Introduction
Throughout his discussions on logic, Immanuel Kant claims that the laws of logic are norma-
tive for thought; in other words, logic as a science does not tell us how the understanding
is and does think and how it has previously proceeded in thought, but rather how it ought
to proceed in thought (Jasche Logic, 14), where the understanding is taken to be our
cognitive capacity for thought in general. If the laws of logic provide us with the correct way
to think, then it should be possible to think incorrectly, or deviate from those laws in some
way. Christine Korsgaard makes this claim clear when she states, There is no normativity
if you cannot go wrong (Korsgaard (1996b, 162)).
Thus, Kant must be able to explain how logical error is possible. This is a problem as he
also claims that the laws of logic are in some way essential to, or constitutive of, the activity
of thought, and essential laws cannot be violated in the way a norm can be violated. He
admits this problem in the following passage:
It is hard to comprehend how a power can deviate from its own laws, since it
acts only according to certain laws. If these laws are essential, then the power
cannot deviate from them[;] if, then, among the formal laws of the understanding
that logic expounds an essential one is possible, then the understanding cannot
deviate from it. (Vienna Logic, 824)
Error is only possible when the sensibility, which is the capacity (receptivity) for receiving
representations through the mode in which we are aected by objects, (Critique of Pure
Reason, A19/B22) somehow interferes with the activity of the understanding. The under-
standing does not err in its own right, and our thought must, in some way, adhere to the laws
of logic. Otherwise, it cannot be considered a product of the understanding: A man can
never err completely and utterly . . . Total error would be a complete opposition to the laws of
the understanding. But then it could not arise from the understanding, which can produce
nothing that conicts with its nature . . . (Vienna Logic, 825-6). Thus, any product of the
1
understanding must comply with its own laws, which just are the laws of logic. But now it
seems that the laws of logic do not possess the desired normative force; it seems that there
are at least some laws of logic that describe how we do think because they are essential to
the act of thought itself.
We have run into what seems to be a serious problem for Kants claims regarding the
nature of logic. As described above, Kant makes the following claims:
(N) The laws of logic are normative for thought. (Jasche Logic, 14)
(ES) There are laws of logic which are essential for, or constitutive of, the act of thought.
(Jasche Logic, 13)
(V) A law that is essential for the activity of the understanding (or any faculty by itself)
cannot be violated. (Vienna Logic, 824)
And we also want to hold that
(ER) For a law to be normative, it must be possible to violate it in some way. In other
words, an ought implies can err.
(V) and (ES) together imply that there are laws of logic which cannot be violated. This
along with (ER) implies that there are some laws of logic which are not normative for
thought, which contradicts (N). How are the laws of logic supposed to be normative if there
is no possible way of violating them?
The goal of this essay is to propose and evaluate an interpretation of Kants logic that
explains all four claims above while also explaining away the contradictory consequence that
apparently follows from the conjunction of these claims. My interpretation will focus on the
taxonomic distinctions that Kant makes throughout the Critique of Pure Reason and his
Lectures on Logic regarding the nature of the dierent kinds of logic.
1
It is generally assumed
that the laws of logic that Kant describes as both normative and essential for thought are
1
The Lectures on Logic are a collection of four texts from dierent periods of Kants career as a lecturer
on logic. The rst three texts are transcripts from his lectures, and the fourth, titled the Jasche Logic, is the
textbook that he had a student compile based on the lecture notes he had accrued throughout his career.
The last two parts, the Vienna Logic and the Jasche Logic, are the two I will use in this essay, as they were
written near or during the periods of his more mature critical philosophy.
2
those laws Kant denes as pure general laws of logic; however, I claim that this assumption
is not textually based and leads to the contradiction described above. Instead, I will argue,
the laws that Kant describes as normative for and essential of thought are the laws of general
logic; it is because we can then represent these laws as either pure or applied that these laws
have the dual nature described. The laws under the broader description of general can be
thought of as both normative and essential. In the end pure general and applied general logic
do not consist of two separate kinds of logic, rather they are two distinct ways of representing
the same laws. The pure general laws are strictly essential for, or constitute of, thought,
while the applied general laws are those that we can violate and those that Kant takes as
normative for thought. In the end, I claim that the normativity of the pure general laws of
logic is at best externally conferred, rather than essentially inherent (Tolley (2006), 375);
our nature as thinking human beings is such that the laws of pure general logic are essential
for thought yet our cognitive capacities allow for empirical-psychological rules to override
the laws of pure general logic while retaining the illusion of thought. It is because we are
beings with these dierent cognitive capacities which are in relation to one another that the
laws of logic are viewed as normative.
I will begin by explaining what is to be expected of a normative interpretation of such
laws, how a constitutive interpretation of Kants laws of logic does not meet these expecta-
tions, and then go on to discuss how dierent normative interpretations of Kants laws of
logic attempt to meet these expectations. I then go on to consider how the normative in-
terpretation may be justied in light of an analogy with Kants description of the moral law
as constitutive and normative for action. In making this analogy I will emphasize the two
standpoint view that Kant puts forth in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and
conclude that the moral law is not essentially normative but rather normative in relation
to certain kinds of beings, or relationally normative. My goal from that point on will be to
show how the two-standpoint view in the moral case is analogous to the distinction between
3
pure and applied general logic, and explain how we can make sense of the normative claims
that Kant makes in light of this distinction. I will end the essay with a discussion of how this
interpertation allows for all four of the claims mentioned above to coexist while eliminating
the contradictory conclusion.
2 A Law as a Norm
If any normative interpretation of Kants laws of logic can be made sense of, the requirements
for a law being normative instead of descriptive must be set forth. A law that is descriptive,
for example, the law stating that the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, simply
describes the way light is. The law doesnt make any normative claims about how fast light
should travel, it states how fast light does travel. In an attempt to get at what it is for a
law to be a norm on Kants account I will consider the two conditions that Clinton Tolley,
in his essay Kant on the Nature of Logical Laws, (Tolley (2006, 375)) suggests:
2
(1) Error Any being subject to the law must both be able to succeed and be able to fail
to act (or be) in accordance with the law.
(2) Identity Even when a being subject to the law does not act in accordance with the
law, the subject still identies itself as being subject to the law regardless.
These are the conditions that he claims, on Kants account, give a law normative force;
such laws prescribe correct action to a being that is subject to the law. To illustrate these
conditions I will use the example of delity as a norm imposed on a subject in a monogamous
2
Tolley provides a third condition, Bindingness: The laws must retain their validity or bindingness over
their subjects regardless of the (lack of) actual adherence to the norms by their subjectsthough, to be
sure, there must be the possibility of such adherence (to uphold the traditional formula that ought implies
can)Tolley (2006, 375). I will not be using this condition because I do not see how it adds signicantly
to the set of conditions, as much of what is important in this third condition is captured by the second
condition. And there are several counterexamples to its validity. For example, consider the following law:
all residents of Berkeley cannot leave Berkeley. But this law is only binding on people in Berkeley, thus if
you leave you are no longer bound by the law. I believe there are ways of addressing this counterexample;
however, the best way to address the issue is by referring to the second condition, identity. Thus, I will
exempt this third condition from my discussion.
4
relationship, that typically imposed by the bond of marriage. The cases I am discussing
are those in which two subjects have agreed that the law of delity is binding over their
relationship. The rst condition, Error, is obviously met: either of the two subjects are
capable of an act of indelity, while also capable of adhering to the law. A being who never
engages in a monogamous relationship will not be subject to the law of delity, just as
inanimate objects can never be subject to this law. This condition is the same one discussed
in the introduction; we can think of it as saying that ought implies can err.
The second condition, Identity, is quite clear in the case of delity; if one of the subjects
fails to act according to the law of delity, they feel guilt (to some degree) because they
still identify themselves as subject to the law. Although this condition clearly holds in the
case of delity, there are other cases where this is less clear; for example, the case of trac
laws. Perhaps I am unaware of a specic trac law; assume this is the law that says that I
must drive under 30mph on the city streets. It is dicult to say that I identify myself with
this law given that I am unaware that it is binding on me. It is clear that this law is still
normative for my action, as the content prescribes how fast I ought to drive, not how fast
I am driving. Thus, this seems to be a counterexample to the second condition. However,
even though I do not identify myself as being subject to this law, it is the case that I identify
myself as being subject to all of the pertinent trac laws. As Tolley notes, this condition
is important, as it implies that evaluative ascriptions in light of norms (e.g., x as in or
out of accord) institute a division within some otherwise well-dened class (Tolley (2006,
375)). Given that I take myself to be subject to the trac laws, when I disobey some law,
even those I am unaware of, my action is evaluated as being out of accord with the laws I
identify myself with.
There is a stronger response against the second condition, however. Instead of being
unaware of the law, I may consider myself above the law. In this case I am aware what the
law expects of me, but I do not identify myself with the law whatsoever. The law in this case
5
is still binding over my action as a driver, and thus it seems like the law is still normative
despite my lack of identication with it. This seems like a clear case where a law is a norm
yet does not satisfy the second condition.
This examples brings out an important distinction between normativity in general and
normativity on Kants account; this distinction is further brought out by considering the
dierences in the delity and trac laws cases. In the delity case the subject has bound
themselves to the law and in that way the subject has internalized the law as a norm. In
the case of the trac laws the laws are externally conferred on the subject, which is why
one can opt out of identifying with the law despite the fact that other people still view the
law as normatively binding on that subject. In a discussion of Kants account of the moral
law being normative, Korsgaard makes the following claims:
Here we come to an important distinction, between norms that are constitutive
of, and so internal, to the activities that they claim to govern, and norms that are
external to those activities . . . External norms give rise to further questions, and
space for skeptical doubt. But if we can identify something as an internal norm,
the question why you should conform to the norm answers itself. (Korsgaard
(2008, 61))
Given this description, our example of trac laws can be seen as external norms; the activity
of driving is not constituted by the trac laws. Whereas the law of delity is constitutive of
a monogamous relationship. To be in a monogamous relationship is to identify yourself with
the law of delity, and in this way the law is internally normative. Thus, it seems that the
condition of identity is a condition of a law being a constitutive norm. And the goal of this
essay is to interpret Kants laws of logic such that they can be taken as both constitutive
of and normative for thought. So although the condition of identity is not a condition on
normativity in general, it is a condition for the kind of norm that we are considering given
Kants account. I shall therefore refer to these conditions throughout the rest of the essay
when considering the dierent interpretations of Kants laws of logic.
6
3 Kants General Logic
Before addressing the constitutive and normative interpretations I want to briey describe
the nature of Kants logic, as well as describe one of the two important taxonomic distinc-
tions that I will be focusing on throughout this essay: the distinction between general and
particular logics. The second distinction, the distinction within general logic between pure
and applied logic, will be discussed in detail in later sections of this essay. It is clear that
the laws of logic that Kant describes as both normative and essential for all thought are to
be of the general kind, not of the particular kind, as in all the relevant texts the important
claims he makes are all in regard to general logic. However, it is generally assumed that
when Kant discusses the laws of logic he is discussing pure general logic only, and that we
should set applied general logic aside because it is not really logic. As we shall see below,
I claim that the distinction between pure and applied is the most important for making
sense of a constitutive and normative interpretation of Kants logical laws. However, before
delving into that topic, I will rst examine the general/particular distinction and try to get
at what is denitive of general logic. Through this examination the ambiguity in Kants
description of general logic as necessary will be illustrated; does he mean the laws of general
logic are necessary in an essential way, or in a normative way? It is not clear because he
never spells it out for us. I will walk through several passages in the Critique of Pure Reason
and the Jasche Logic in which he describes his distinction between general and particular
logics, emphasizing the ambiguity of the term necessary.
3.1 Abstraction and Necessity
Kant claims that general logic is distinguished from particular logic in that the former
abstracts away from all objects of thought. It is because of this abstraction that logic
7
provides the necessary laws of thought.
3
After having abstracted away from all objects of
thought whatever is left will be something that all acts of thought share without exception.
The only exception would come about because of a particular kind of content, which would
result in the use of the understanding that is particular. Kant states there is, for example,
a use of the understanding in mathematics, in metaphysics, morals, etc. (JL, 12). When
thinking about any one particular area, then, there are laws of a particular logic that are
applicable. But general laws of logic are applicable to all thought. His descriptions of general
logic are similar in both major texts:
Now logic in turn can be undertaken with two dierent aims, either as the logic of
the general or of the particular use of the understanding. The former contains the
absolutely necessary rules of thinking, without which no use of the understanding
takes place, and it therefore concerns these rules without regard to the dierence
of the objects to which it may be directed. (Critique of Pure Reason, B76/A52)
If now we put aside all cognition that we have to borrow from objects and merely
reect on the use just of the understanding, we discover those of its rules which
are necessary without qualication, for every purpose and without regard to
any particular objects of thought, because without them we would not think
at all. Thus we can have insight into these rules a priori, i.e., independent of
all experience, because they contain merely the conditions for the use of the
understanding in general, without distinction among its objects, be that use pure
or empirical. (Jasche Logic, 12)
Given his descriptions, there are two main features of general logic:
1) Abstraction from all content of thought.
2) Because of this abstraction, we are left with the necessary rules of the use of the
understanding.
Thus, we must understand these two features in more detail, and how they are related to
one another.
The rst thing to understand is exactly what Kant means by abstracting away from
the objects of thought. He describes the abstraction as leaving only the relations between
3
Note that I will be using laws of thought synonymously with laws of general logic, as Kant does,
unless otherwise stated.
8
thoughts, or, as he describes this, the mere form of thinking (Critique of Pure Reason,
B78/A54). For example, if we abstract away from the content of the following inference:
All objects on the table are green.
This cup is on the table.
Therefore, this cup is green.
we are left with the relation of these thoughts to one another. This leaves us with a skeleton,
so to speak, which can be classied as a specic form of logical syllogism that can then be
analyzed. The content of these thoughts are the objects related to the concepts object on
the table, green, and cup. The understanding has related these contents to one another
according to the following form:
1) All Fs are Gs.
2) S is a F.
S is a G.
Premise 1 is the major premise; in this case it is a universal proposition; premise 2 is the
minor premise; in this case it is an armative proposition. This is an instance of the rst
gure of inference, from this the following rules for the three latter gures emerge (Jasche
Logic, 127).
Much of his discussion of general logic is put in terms of the formal aspects of thought,
and thus it is important to explain the relationship between Kants logic being general and
its being formal. This is discussed in detail in John MacFarlanes paper Frege, Kant, and
the Logic in Logicism, in which he argues that Frege and Kant can be considered as having
the same view of the nature of logic because they both claim that logic should be general ;
where general here is of a normative sort discussed below. In the process of providing his
argument, MacFarlane shows that the formality of Kants logic is actually a consequence of
the generality of logic, and not an independent feature. Thus, whenever we discuss the formal
9
nature of logic, it is imperative to realize that this formality stems from logics generality.
Although we can separate them conceptually, it is not possible to have one without the other.
At this point we understand that general logic abstracts away from the content of thought,
and the laws of logic are in some way derived from this abstraction. However, this does not
further clarify our understanding of the way Kant uses the term necessary in his description
of general logic. Given dierent pieces of textual evidence we can interpret Kant as intending
to mean dierent things. Thus, at this point there are two ways to understand what Kant
means by absolutely necessary in the phrase absolutely necessary rules of thinking. There
is a stronger interpretation of necessary which suggests that every act of thought adheres
to these laws of logic; this coincides with the constitutive interpretation. If this is correct
then every thought is logical. As we shall see, this interpretation is supported by sections of
the texts where he claims that the faculty of the understanding, when considered by itself,
cannot think in opposition to its own rules. The weaker, normative interpretation takes this
necessity to imply that the laws of logic are normatively binding on the rational individual,
and given the conditions for a law being a norm this interpretation attempts to make sense
of logical error.
3.2 The Constitutive Interpretation
The constitutive, essential interpretation claims that thought must adhere to the laws of
logic if the action is considered thought at all. The term constitutive can be understood
as, in a sense, descriptive. Just as there is a law which states how fast the speed of light is,
the laws of logic, on this interpretation, describe how the understanding works. Thus, if the
understanding is in use it must be the case that the thought produced by the understanding
abides by, or adheres to, those general laws of logic. This is one way of explaining what it
means for rules to be necessary without qualication; in other words, this interpretation
takes the laws of logic to be necessary conditions for every act of thought. This interpretation
10
takes Kants laws of logic as failing to meet the rst condition of normativity, Error. Although
this interpretation may seem a bit extreme, and seems to go against what weve seen Kant
says about the normative nature of logic, it is supported throughout both the Critique of
Pure Reason and the Jasche Logic when he discusses how the understanding cannot err
because it necessarily adheres to its own laws:
. . . a total error would be a complete opposition to the laws of the understanding
and of reason. But how could that, as such, in any way come from the under-
standing and, insofar as it is still a judgment, be held to be a product of the
understanding. (Jasche Logic, 54)
. . . it is hard to comprehend how error in the formal sense of the world, i.e., how
the form of thought contrary to the understanding is possible, just as we cannot
in general comprehend how any power should deviate from its own essential laws.
(Jasche Logic, 53)
hence neither the understanding by itself (without the inuence of another cause),
nor the senses by themselves, can err; the rst cannot, because while it acts merely
according to its own laws, its eect (the judgment) must necessarily agree with
these laws. (Critique of Pure Reason, B350/A294)
The constitutive interpretation draws from these quotes that there are laws of logic that
cannot be violated in thought. The understanding acts according to the laws of logic, and
the resulting judgment must agree with them. This last quote is especially strong: the eect
is not just assessable by the laws, the result does agree with these laws.
4
This interpretation
requires an explanation of what it is for thought to be untainted by the inuence of other
faculties, and how it is that this purity relates to the strong necessity claim.
The constitutive interpretation of necessity thus makes sense of the textual claims that
Kant makes regarding error. However, it leads us to the unsatisfactory conclusion that logical
error is impossible. And, as we discussed above, if logical error is impossible the logical laws
4
I draw this conclusion from Kants usage of the phrase must necessarily in the passage. It may be
argued that this phrase could be taken deontically, so that the passages implies that judgment ought to
agree with these laws. This would imply some sort of normative interpretation. However, if this were the
case, then there should be a deontic interpretation of can err in the preceding sentence. This does not seem
correct at all, which is why I am taking must necessarily agree with these laws as a metaphysical necessity.
11
do not meet the requirement for being a normative law. As the nature of logical error is
important to our discussion, I will briey comment on Kants claims regarding the existence
of error. As pointed out above, the understanding itself cannot err, and neither can any
faculty alone err.
Instead, error is the product of some kind of interference with the use of the understand-
ing. In the discussion of truth and error in the Jasche Logic Kant claims that the ground
for the origin of all error will therefore have to be sought simply and solely in the unnoticed
inuence of sensibility upon the understanding, or to speak more exactly, upon judgment
(Jasche Logic, 53-4). Sensibility is our capacity for taking in the world, and all cognition
requires input from sensibility and conceptual activity from the understanding. Thus, the
laws of logic only govern the use of our higher cognitive abilities, and our ability to think
badly stems not from any fault of the understanding itself, but rather from its interaction
with objects in the world. Another way of saying this is that error stems from how our
passive faculty of sensibility comes together with our active faculty of understanding. It
seems, then, given the connection we have been discussing between the ability to err and
normativity, it follows that the laws of logic are taken to be normative only insofar as there
is this possibility of this external interference. It could be that the seemingly normative
nature of the laws of logic stems from some relation between the dierent cognitive faculties
that beings like us possess.
3.3 The Normative Interpretation
Despite Kants claims about the laws of logic being essential for the activity of thought,
throughout the Lectures on Logic he makes several explicit claims regarding the normative
nature of these laws of logic. If this is the case then the laws of logic should meet the two
conditions for normativity. The most oft-cited quote is from the Jasche Logic, where in
describing the laws of general logic he makes the following claim:
12
As a science of the necessary laws of thought, without which no use of the under-
standing or of reason takes place at all, laws which consequently are conditions
under which the understanding can and ought to agree with itself alonethe nec-
essary laws and conditions of its correct uselogic is, however, a canon. (Jasche
Logic, 13)
This is the rst place the word ought shows up in this text, and suggests that this ought
is a consequence of the necessity of the laws of thought. Here Kant also talks of the laws of
logic as also being conditions for the use of the understanding, and it is in terms of conditions
that he speaks of the correct use of the understanding. Thus, general logic consists of the
necessary laws of thought and from these laws the conditions for correct thought follow.
Unless Kant is using the term ought in some non-normative way, it must be possible to
make sense of the laws of general logic in some way to fulll the two conditions provided
above for a law to be a norm.
Thus, we cannot rule out the possibility that normativity is somehow essential to the
nature of general logic; the question at hand, however, is whether or not normativity is
denitive of generality. At this point it is worth noting that in the Critique of Pure Reason
Kant does not mention the normative nature of general logic explicitly, neither in the section
On Logic in General nor anywhere else in the text.
5
If the generality being discussed were
inherently normative, meaning that this generality could be explained by normativity, it
could be expected to see use of the term ought in this discussion. However, in the Critique
he explains generality only in terms of abstraction, not normativity. This will only make
5
By explicitly I mean the explicit use of the word ought. However, it could be argued that the
normativity is explicitly referenced in both texts on when Kant talks about the laws of logic being rules for
thought. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant describes these laws as the absolutely necessary
rules of thinking (Critique of Pure Reason, B76/B52). And in the Jasche Logic the laws of logic are those
rules which are necessary without qualication (Jasche Logic, 12). However, at the very beginning of the
introduction to the Jasche Logic Kant claims that Everything in nature, both in the lifeless and in the
living world, takes place according to rules . . . Water falls according to the laws of gravity, and with animals
locomotion also takes place according to rules. The sh in water, the bird in air, move according to rules
(Jasche Logic, 11). The laws of gravity are not normative, they are descriptive, and the fact that Kant is
suggesting that these laws are to be considered rules shows that we should not take Kants description of
the laws of logic as rules to be indicating any sort of normativity.
13
sense if we nd that this abstraction is itself inherently normative.
Although it is left unclear exactly how these laws are also essential conditions for the
activity of thought, the normative interpretation views Kant as going on to further forge the
connection between necessity and normativity as inherent, as he claims in the Jasche Logic:
In logic, however, the question is not about contingent but about necessary rules;
not how we do think, but how we ought to think . . . In logic we do not want
to know how the understanding is and does think and how it has previously
proceeded in thought, but rather how it ought to proceed in thought. Logic is to
teach us the correct use of the understanding. (Jasche Logic, 14)
Here we can interpret Kant as drawing a parallel between descriptive laws and contingency,
and normative laws and necessity. Thus, there is some connection between the laws of
general logic and how we ought to think, although it is not described explicitly any further
in his works.
The laws of general logic, then, are normative for thought in some way, yet it has not
been shown that this normativity is denitive of why general logic is to be thought of as
general. Why should the mere abstraction from all content of thought result in normative
rules? This normativity seems to be adding something to the idea of general logic, but Kant
never species what. Thus, in order for the normative interpretation of necessity to hold, it
must be able to explain how the nature of general necessity as abstraction from all content
of thought entails the normative claims that we nd in the Jasche Logic.
3.3.1 MacFarlanes Normative Interpretation
John MacFarlane, in his paper briey discussed above, titled Frege, Kant, and the Logic in
Logicism, advocates a version of the normative interpretation of Kants general logic. He
claims that normativity is denitive of Kants general logic: The generality of logic, for Frege
as for Kant, is a normative generality: logic is general in the sense that it provides constitutive
norms for thought as such, regardless of its subject matter (MacFarlane (2002, 35)). In this
14
section I will present and evaluate MacFarlanes claims regarding the normative generality
of logic, concluding that the outcome of his explanation of logical laws as constitutive norms
is attractive, but that it is does not fully account for the second condition of normativity
because it does not explain how the laws of logic are active in thought.
MacFarlane rst presents and explains his distinction between descriptive laws and nor-
mative laws, and then goes on to explain that Kants logic must be of a normative generality
because Kants laws of logic are to be thought of as constitutive norms given the textual
evidence just discussed above. He distinguishes between the two types of laws as follows:
A normative law prescribes what one ought to do or provides a standard for
the evaluation of ones conduct as good or bad. A descriptive law, on the other
hand, describes certain regularities in the order of thingstypically those with
high explanatory value. (MacFarlane (2002, 35))
Given this distinction, then, we can draw a parallel with the constitutive and normative
interpretations of necessity associated with generality. A descriptive characterization of gen-
erality is going to align with the constitutive interpretation, wherein the laws describe some
aspect of the process of thought which is necessary in that this description is of something
which always occurs. A normative characterization of generality is one in which the laws
are standards for the evaluation for some act in general ; in other words, in order to perform
such an act one must necessarily be assessable in light of those laws.
The laws of logic are general in this way, MacFarlane claims, in that to count an activity
as thinking at all is to hold it assessable in light of the laws of logic (MacFarlane, 37).
The laws that are normatively general in this way are to be taken to be constitutive norms.
MacFarlane provides an example of how the laws of physics are constitutive norms for making
judgments about the physical world:
[The laws of physics] have prescriptive consequences for anyone engaged in the
game of thinking about the physical world: such a thinker ought not make
15
judgments that are incompatible with them. Indeed, insofar as ones activity
is to count as making judgments about the physical world at all, it must be
assessable for correctness in light of the laws of physics. In this sense, the laws of
physics provide constitutive norms for the activity of thinking about the physical
world. (MacFarlane (2002, 37))
MacFarlane claims that the laws are constitutive because they are unconditionally binding
on the activity itself; in other words, the activity cannot be performed without those laws
as standards for evaluation of the activity. For example, if I begin to posit the existence of
ying pigs it is either that I have opted out of the activity of thinking about the physical
world, and thus am no longer assessable by the laws of physics, or I am having incorrect
thoughts about the physical world despite the fact that I am attempting to think correctly
because I consider my thoughts to be assessable by the laws of physics. Thus, constitutive
norms are also normative because it is possible to think incorrectly; it is only necessary that
the thought be assessable in light of those norms.
MacFarlanes goal in his essay is to show how both Frege and Kant think of logic as
general in the normative sense, and most of his discussion of the normative characterization
of generality is in light of Freges claims. However, in the section titled Kants Charac-
terization of Logic as General, he quotes from Kant to support this claim. He quotes the
distinction in the Jasche Logic between general logic being necessary and particular laws
being contingent, where Kant describes the laws of general logic as those without which
no use of the understanding would be possible at all (Jasche Logic, 12), a quote which we
are now quite familiar with at this point. And, as we have seen, generality and necessity go
together on Kants account, although the nature of this necessity has been ambiguous. This
is the interesting move: MacFarlane assumes that Kants general necessity is normative.
The necessary rules are necessary, not in the sense that we cannot think con-
trary to them, but in the sense that they are unconditionally binding norms for
thoughtnorms, that is, for thought as such. (Compare the sense in which Kant
calls the categorical imperative necessary.) Similarly, the contingent rules of
16
the understanding provided by geometry or physics are contingent, not in the
sense that they could have been otherwise, but in the sense that they are binding
on our thought only conditionally: they bind us only to the extent that we think
about space, matter, or energy. (MacFarlane (2002, 47))
Surely we can make sense of this interpretation, as the normative interpretation is attractive
for explaining the claims that Kant makes regarding the ought in the Jasche Logic, but
it is unclear still why we should interpret the necessity as normative. The main problem is
that MacFarlane does not go on to mention the other more explicit normative claims that
Kant makes about the laws of logic, nor does he go on to say anything else to support his
interpretation. If the necessity under discussion is normative, then this will make sense
of Kants claims in the Critique of Pure Reason as well as the Jasche Logic regarding the
normative nature of general logic. But further justication is not provided.
MacFarlanes idea of a constitutive norm is certainly an attractive one for explaining
the nature of Kants laws of logic. The laws have a constitutive component that makes
them unconditionally binding on the thinking subject, which, it could be argued, meets the
second condition of normativity, identity. His account denitely allows for error, which is
the rst condition for a law to be a norm, because his concept of a constitutive norm is
dened in terms of assessibility. As mentioned above the laws of physics are normative
in that in thinking about the physical world the subjects thought is assessable in light of
the laws of physics. The laws of logic are unconditionally binding in that in order to be
considered thinking at all, one must be assessable by the laws of logic. Thus, MacFarlanes
interpretation assumes that the laws can be adhered to and not adhered to, which allows for
error.
However, it is not so clear exactly how MacFarlanes explanation accounts for the second
condition. At rst, it seems he could meet this condition through some explanation of the
unconditional binding on the thinking subject; the laws of logic constitute the act of thought
and thus are internally conferred laws. Yet MacFarlanes explanation of this binding is in
17
terms of assessability, which is a passive notion. It is unclear how the notion of assessability
is supposed to make such a strong binding claim on the subject. Consider the case of the
law of delity; my action is surely assessable in light of the law of delity, but that is because
I identify myself as a being in a monogamous relationship. It is not that because my action
is assessable in light of the law of delity that I identify myself as a being in a monogamous
relationship. Assessability is a consequence of the two conditions of normativity, not the
other way around.
These norms should have the feature of being used in the assessment of whether or
not a logical law is abided by, but it is unclear how this assessment can be denitive of
the constitutive nature of the laws. In his explanation MacFarlane notes that the necessity
inherent in the laws of logic is to be taken as analogous to the necessity inherent in the moral
law. This suggests that the moral law is also unconditionally binding on action insofar as
action is assessed in light of the moral law. However, a being subject to the moral law is
not merely bound because their action is assessable by the moral law; the moral law actively
guides the subject. The way in which the moral law is active will be discussed in more
detail below. Given that MacFarlanes notion of assessability is a passive one, it does not
account for the active force that the necessary laws of logic should play in Kants account.
On MacFarlanes interpretation, every act of thought is to be assessable by these norms, but
Kants description of the use of the understanding requires that these laws be active. These
laws are constitutive of the activity of the understanding itself, thought, and the use of the
understanding is a spontaneous activity which imposes conceptual form onto all objects of
experience.
Kant describes the spontaneous nature of the faculty of the understanding throughout
his works, but most heavily in the Transcendental Logic of the Critique of Pure Reason:
If we will call the receptivity of our mind to receive representations insofar as it
is aected in some way sensibility, then on the contrary, the faculty for bringing
18
forth representations itself, or the spontaneity of cognition, is the understanding.
(B75/A51)
Concepts are therefore grounded on the spontaneity of thinking, as sensible in-
tuitions are grounded on the receptivity of impressions. (A68/B93)
. . . the combination of a manifold in general can never come to us through the
senses, and therefore cannot already be contained in the pure form of sensible
intuition; for it is an act of the spontaneity of the power of representation, and,
since one must call the latter understanding, in distinction from sensibility, all
combination, whether we are conscious of it or not, whether it is a combination
of the manifold of intuition or of several concepts, and in the rst case either of
sensible or non-sensible intuition, is an action of the understanding . . . which can
be executed only by the subject itself, since it is an act of its self-activity. (B130)
In all of these passages the understanding is contrasted to the sensibility, in that the faculty
of sensibility receives sensory input, which is why it is considered a passive faculty. The
understanding, on the other hand, is spontaneous; it is an active combination of represen-
tations into concepts, judgments, and inferences. If the laws of logic are constitutive of the
use of the understanding, just as the moral law is for the use of practical reason, then these
laws must be guiding the act of thought.
Thus, although this notion makes sense of the normative claims that have been discussed,
there is something missing from MacFarlanes description; that something is an explanation
of the active normative force that Kants laws of logic seem to impose on all use of the
understanding. This notion of normative force is itself not clear, but it can been seen how
the necessity involved with Kants laws of logic, if they are to be considered constitutive
norms, must do more than act as passive standards from which all thought is assessed.
3.3.2 Korsgaards Normative Interpretation
Christine Korsgaard, in the chapter The Metaphysics of Normativity of her book Self-
Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, discusses a somewhat similar notion to Mac-
Farlanes constitutive norm, except her notion brings out the active nature of the laws of
logic that MacFarlanes discussion lacks. She describes the constitutive norm as uncondi-
19
tionally binding because all actions under the power of these norms are necessarily guided by
the constitutive norms; not merely assessable in light of them. Korsgaard uses the concept
of a constitutive principle, which she describes as follows:
In these cases what we say is that if you are not guided by the principle, you
are not performing the activity at all. In the case of essentially goal-directed
activities, constitutive principles arise from the constitutive standards to which
they are directed. . . . To use a controversial example, it is a constitutive principle
of thinking that you swerve when you see a contradiction looming ahead in your
path. And in these cases, we can say that unless you are guided by the principle
in question, you are not performing that activity at all. (Korsgaard (2009, 29))
On this account the principles are unconditionally binding, except we make sense of this in
terms of a kind of self-imposed intention towards always acting, or thinking, according to
those principles. In terms of Kants general laws of logic, we can see this as saying that
every act of the understanding strives towards adherence with the laws of logic. It is not
just that our thought is assessable in light of these laws, which is also certainly the case on
this interpretation, it is that the activity itself is guided by the intention of adhering to those
laws. Korsgaard provides an intuitive example of how to further understand this notion of
guided by:
The presence of both a noun and a verb in an English sentence is constitutive of
its being a sentence, that is, of its expressing a complete thought. Yet those of
us whose work includes grading papers have all encountered the verbless string
of words that wants to be a sentence and fails, and yet is not mere gibberish.
There is such a thing as speaking English badly, and it is not quite the same
as not speaking at all, althoughimportantlyit tends in that direction. For
if you ignore the rules of English altogether, what you speak will simply not be
English. (Korsgaard (2009, 30))
The act of writing the incorrect yet not gibberish sentence involves striving towards a correct
sentence; when I am writing I am not actively aware of the grammatical rules of English, but
my action is guided by those rules in that I am writing a sentence in English. The rules of
20
English grammar are not normative in that the product of the writing is assessable in light
of these rules, but that the activity of writing an English sentence is compelled by those
rules.
If the laws of logic are constitutive principles in Korsgaards terms then they should fulll
the two conditions for being norms for thought. It is possible to think incorrectly, yet one
is compelled by the laws and is therefore identifying oneself with the laws while also being
bound by them. The advantage that Korsgaards account has over MacFarlanes is that is
provides the sense that the laws of logic are active in relation to thought, they play some sort
of role in creating the thought instead of being those laws that thought is merely assessable
in light of.
Despite this advantage over MacFarlanes interpretation, Korsgaard does not fully explain
how it is possible to err on her account. It is the case that to think you must be guided
by the laws of logic, but this notion of guided by is not made clear and this does not
seem to explain why the laws of logic meet the rst condition, Error. The laws of logic
could constitute thought insofar as these laws guide the use of the understanding, while the
understanding always succeeds in adhering to the laws. Thus, this interpretation succeeds
in providing an account of the active nature of the laws of logic, but does not succeed in
explaining how and why the laws of logic meet the rst condition for normativity.
My goal in this section has been to provide an example of the normative interpretation
of the general nature of Kants logic, show how it is inadequate as it stands, and go on to
suggest ways which this description could be improved upon. Towards this goal I presented
MacFarlanes account of Kants general logic as denitively normative, and then showed
how his interpretation, although plausible, is unsupported as it stands. I pointed out that
MacFarlanes notion of a constitutive norm is the kind of notion we need to interpret Kants
laws of logic so that the problem described in the introduction can be avoided. Thus, the goal
at hand is to nd a way to further justify the existence of such constitutive norms for logic,
21
and how they stem from the general logic. I also pointed out that the notion of constitutive
norm we are searching for should be of an active sort, somehow explaining the normative
force that necessarily compels every thought towards logical adherence. MacFarlane draws an
analogy between the categorical imperative in Kants moral philosophy and the constitutive
necessity inherent in the laws of logic, and on Korsgaards account we nd a similar analogy
as well. In the next section I will explore how the moral law on Kants account is to be
interpreted as normative, constitutive, or both with the goal of drawing the proper analogy
with the laws of logic.
4 The Moral Law and the Laws of Logic
4.1 Both Normative and Non-Normative
Kants moral philosophy is taken as a paradigm account of presenting a normative law. The
categorical imperative states that one must act only in accordance with that maxim through
which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law (Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, 4:421).
6
The categorical imperative is absolutely general in that it
is objectively necessary for all action without reference to another end. The normative
nature of the categorical imperative is that it is an imperative, which is dened by Kant in
the following way:
All imperatives are expressed by an ought and indicate by this the relation of
an objective law of reason to a will that by its subjective constitution is not
necessarily determined by it (a necessitation). They say that to do or to omit
something would be good, but they say it to a will that does not always do
something just because it is represented to it that it would be good to do that
thing. (Groundwork, 4:413)
6
Throughout the rest of the essay I will abbreviate the title of this work as Groundwork.
22
The moral law is an imperative for beings like us because our rational capacity, the faculty
of reason, does not infallibly determine the will (Groundwork, 4:412). The law is a norm
precisely because it fullls the two conditions as described above. Human beings are imper-
fectly rational beings, which means that we do not always act in accord with the moral law;
thus, the moral law fullls the rst condition of Error. It is also the case that human beings
identify themselves as being subject to the moral law even when they disobey the law. This
is because humans are rational, albeit imperfectly rational, beings. This is an important
aspect of Kants moral theory because it is the sense of a free will that human beings have
because they have rational capacities that forces this identication with the moral law onto
the human subject.
So if there is an analogy to be drawn between the moral law and the laws of logic,
it seems that there will be a way for the normative interpretation of the laws of logic to
be justied. This seems to be good news for the normative interpretation. However, the
normative interpretation of the moral law is not completely safe itself. Throughout the
discussion above the moral law has been discussed as normative in relation to the kind of
beings that we are. But in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant presents us
with the possibility of a non-normative relation between the moral law and rational beings,
that of the divine will.
The relationship between the moral law and the human will is described in the following
passage from the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals:
. . . if reason solely by itself does not adequately determine the will; if the will is
exposed also to subjective conditions (certain incentives) that are not always in
accord with the objective ones; in a word, if the will is not in itself completely in
conformity with reason (as is actually the case with human beings), then actions
that are cognized as objectively necessary are subjectively contingent, and the
determination of such a will in conformity with the objective laws is necessitation:
that is to say, the relation of objective laws to a will that is not thoroughly good is
represented as the determination of the will of a rational being through grounds
of reason, indeed, but grounds to which this will is not by its nature necessarily
23
obedient. (Groundwork, 4:413)
As discussed above, this quote is explaining how the moral law is normative for the human
will because humans are not constituted such that they always obey the moral law. The
human will is aected by inclinations, as Kant says: The dependence of the faculty of desire
upon feelings is called inclination, and this accordingly always indicated a need . . . This,
accordingly, is present only in the case of a dependent will, which is not of itself always
in conformity with reason; in the case of the divine will we cannot think of any interest
(Groundwork, 4:414). Even though the human will identies itself with the moral law because
it is a rational being, it is not the case that this rationality constitutes the human will
completely. If this were the case then those actions cognized as objectively necessary would
be subjectively necessary as well. In the quote above Kant is explaining how the human will
can understand that a particular action is objectively necessary, or right, and still not feel
compelled to do this action because there is interference from the other faculties, making
the moral law subjectively contingent on the humans action.
However, a purely rational being, one that does not have any other subjective inuences,
is one such that reason infallibly determines the will, the actions of such a being that
are cognized as objectively necessary are also subjectively necessary, that is, the will is a
capacity to choose only that which reason independently of inclination cognizes as practically
necessary, that is, as good (Groundwork, 4:412). Although such a being still has the capacity
to choose, the being will always choose to do the right thing. Kant goes on to make the
following important claim:
A perfectly good will would, therefore, equally stand under objective laws (of the
good), but it could not on this account be represented as necessitated to actions
in conformity with law since of itself, by its subjective constitution, it can be
determined only through the representation of the good. Hence no imperatives
hold for the divine will and in general for a holy will: the ought is out of place
here, because volition is of itself necessarily in accord with the law. Therefore
imperatives are only formulae expressing the relation of objective laws of volition
24
in general to the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being,
for example, of the human will. (Groundwork, 4:414)
In this passage Kant explicitly states that the moral law is not normative for the divine will.
The moral law constitutes the action of the divine will. As Tolley states, the moral law does
not tell pure practical reason how it should, but might not, act. Rather, the moral law simply
expresses what pure practical reason is, in its very nature or essential constitution (Tolley
(2006, 378)). This leads to the conclusion that the moral law is not essentially normative,
rather it becomes normative when in relation to a will like that of a human beings will.
This leads to the question of exactly how a law could be normative only in relation to some
application of the law.
It may seem dicult at rst to see the important dierence between the essentially
normative and relationally normative accounts. Allen Wood, in his book Kants Ethical
Thought, makes the same sorts of claims regarding the divine will as we mentioned above:
If the will is perfect or holy, then normative law tells us what its self-determined
volitions necessarily are; if it is nite and imperfect rather than holy, then this
law is a categorical imperative, determining what its volitions ought to be. (Wood
(1999, 174))
Just as discussed above, this quote explains that the law does not impose an ought on the
perfectly good will. Despite this, Wood goes on to make the claim that the laws of every
will must be normative... and the laws of a holy will, just because it is a will, have to be
normative, but they are not obligatory (Wood (1999, 379)). Woods account of the moral
law is one that is essentially normative, not relationally normative. The law is normative by
nature. I bring up Woods point to contrast the two views of normativity, but it is dicult
to understand Woods position. How can a law be normative and not obligatory? Certainly,
according to the conditions that I set out at the beginning of the essay, Woods interpretation
does not make sense. If the moral law is not essentially normative, how does the law retain
its normative force? The next section addresses this concern.
25
4.2 The Two Standpoints and Relational Normativity
One question that can be raised about the content of the last section is how, exactly, does
the moral law fulll the second condition of being a norm? Because we are beings that are
constituted dierently from the divine will, and we have other inuences on our action, how
does the moral law bind the human will at all? The answer to this question is found in
the two standpoints argument that Kant gives during his discussion of the moral law. And
from this, I claim, the explanation of how the moral law is normative only in relation to the
human will is found.
As mentioned above, human beings are constituted by the convergence of many dierent
faculties. And because of this we are able to identify, at the level of reection, ourselves with
each faculty considered independently of the others. Although these faculties work together,
Kant claims that we have two standpoints from which we can consider ourselves as beings:
. . . a rational being must regard himself as intelligence (hence not from the side
of his lower powers) as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of un-
derstanding; hence he has two standpoints from which he can regard himself and
cognize laws for the use of his powers and consequently for all his actions; rst, in-
sofar as he belongs to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy);
second, as belonging to the intelligible world, under laws which, being indepen-
dent of nature, are not empirical but grounded merely in reason. (Groundwork,
4:452)
I would like to take Kants talk of worlds here loosely, as I advocate a two-aspects version
of the two standpoints and not a two-worlds version.
7
Thus, I interpret Kant as saying that
we can consider our action from the sensible or phenomenal standpoint, as well as from
the intelligible or noumenal standpoint. We are, however, in both standpoints at all times.
It is just that we can consider the standpoints separately when we consider how we are
constituted as beings from a meta-philosophical perspective.
7
Please see Appendix A for a more in-depth discussion of Kants Transcendental Idealism and the two-
aspects interpretation.
26
From the phenomenal standpoint everything is causally determined by the laws of nature,
and it is easy to see how the faculty of desire can be viewed from this standpoint. I need to
eat because I need to eat to survive. All of these needs are driven by the laws of nature and
are causally inescapable. Thus, when I consider my action from the phenomenal standpoint
I am observing myself as being pushed and pulled around the world by these determined
causes. I do not think that it is unrealistic that we can consider ourselves this way; in fact,
I think it is fair to say that individuals who do not believe they have free will are saying
that they believe there is no other way to view action correctly but from the phenomenal
standpoint.
Here is a personal example of a time when I observed myself as a phenomenal being: after
applying to graduate school programs I could not stop checking my email inbox constantly.
There would be times where I would be focusing on something else, say, writing my thesis,
and all of a sudden, without any way of stopping myself, I was compelled to check my email.
I felt as if someone else was forcing me to click on the inbox every time. Although I knew
that I should stop, my desire to receive an email regarding my graduate school applications
was so strong that it overruled any other reasons. Korsgaard describes the phenomenal
standpoint as follows: The person who acts from self-love is in a sense not actively willing
at all, but simply allowing herself to be controlled by the passive part of her nature, which
in turn is controlled by all of nature (Korsgaard (1996a, 168)). An individual who lived
their life purely from the phenomenal standpoint would never make a choice about how to
act, as the faculty of sensibility and desire (the lower faculties) would constitute the action
of the individual. Such a being would be pulled and pushed around the world without any
hesitation.
An important feature of my compulsive email checking example is that I felt as if I was
betraying my own reason every time I went to check for a new message. Even as I was in
the act of checking I was somewhat ashamed of myself for not controlling my own action. I
27
knew that I was capable of controlling my action because I am also a being constituted by
thought and reason; I did not stop being a thinking being when I went to check my inbox, I
was conicted because two aspects of my nature as a being were in conict.
This capacity for self-reection and self-control stems from human beings as constituted
from the noumenal standpoint. As human beings we also possess higher faculties of under-
standing and reason, which are both law governing faculties. Given these capacities, human
beings can consider their action from the noumenal standpoint as well, and it is the idea of
freedom that allows the moral law to be binding on the human will. Kant states:
. . . the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world and conse-
quently, if I were only this, all my actions would always be in conformity with
the autonomy of the will; but since at the same time I intuit myself as a member
of the world of sense, they ought to be in conformity with it . . . (Groundwork,
4:454)
When we consider ourselves from the noumenal standpoint, we view ourselves as law-giving
creatures with the capacity to act and think. Because human beings have the ability to
consider themselves as rational beings abstracted away from the inuence of the faculties
of sensibility and desire, we can see in ourselves the capacity for pure practical reason, that
of the divine will. From this noumenal standpoint the human being understands that the
world of the understanding contains the ground of the world of sense and so too of its laws,
and is therefore immediately lawgiving with respect to my will (Groundwork, 4:444)). As
a being that can take on the noumenal standpoint, I, as a human being, have (or at least
I feel that I have) the ability to inuence what goes on in the phenomenal world; I do not
have to be pushed and pulled around by the laws of nature because I am a being such that I
can impose my own will onto the phenomenal world. In the example of my compulsive email
checking it was the case that I was able to choose to turn o the wireless on my computer
and give my phone to a friend so that I would be unable to continue to stop. In the end I
was able to use my ability to act to stop myself from being pushed to check my email.
28
Korsgaard explains this as follows: You actually contribute we might say to the
rational, as opposed to the merely natural, ordering of the sensible world. The choice of the
moral maxim over the maxim of self-love may then be seen as a choice of genuine activity over
passivity; a choice to use your active powers to make a dierence in the world (Korsgaard
(1996a, 169)). The divine will also has the ability to choose, it is just that the divine will
always chooses between actions that always accord with the moral law. The divine will is
always active. The human will, however, has the ability to choose to do the right thing or
the wrong thing because, as Kant says in the quote above, the human will also intuits itself
as a member of the phenomenal world.
The main point to be made here is that the ought emerges from the relation between the
two standpoints. The human will is rational and thus identies itself with the moral law, but
is also sensible and realizes that it does not always act in accordance with that moral law.
Thus, the moral law becomes an imperative for the human will. Kant states: The moral
ought is then his [a human will] own necessary will as a member of an intelligible world,
and is thought by him as ought only insofar as he regards himself at the same time as a
member of the world of sense (Groundwork, 4:455). This notion of ought is relational; the
moral law is not essentially normative, but only takes up that role when placed in relation to
some opposing inuences. The normativity is, in the words of Tolley once again, externally
conferred.
Before moving on to the analogy with the laws of logic, I will present an illustrative
example of relational normativity. We have the rules for the working of some kind of machine.
These rules explain exactly how the machine works and what it does. Perhaps the rules
describing the workings of the machine comprise an instruction set for a Turing machine,
which will continue to follow its instructions until they are completed, or the process simply
never terminates. In this case the rules are only constitutive, as we do not speak of how
Turing machines ought to work; these machines exist in the abstract, which excludes the
29
possibility of any interference. The rules in this case are not normative. This is analogous
to the case of the divine will and the moral law. However, suppose that we create a real
machine in the real world that works according to these rules. The machine will do exactly
what the rules tell it to do, unless something interferes with the ability of the machine to
adhere to the rules. Perhaps the machine runs out of power, or one of the parts of the
machine is destroyed by some natural cause. In this case the machine will malfunction, it
will not be working correctly. It is only because of the possibility of interference given the
nature of the overall setting with which the machine is in that we think of the machine as
working correctly or incorrectly. We do not think of the abstract Turing machine as working
correctly, we simply think of it as working. The rules are normative in relation to a situation
where it is possible for the machine to err. Just in this way, the moral law is normative in
relation to the kinds of beings whose nature is prone to err.
4.3 Analogy
If the laws of logic are normative in the same way that the moral law in relation to the
human will is normative, then there must be a way to delineate between two standpoints in
a similar manner, as well as explain the active component of the use of the understanding
to account for some sort of freedom in thought. The goal is to nd a way to make sense of
the normative claims Kant makes in regard to the laws of logic, so it is important to make
sense of the laws of logic being relationally normative and not, as is the case with the moral
law and the divine will, merely constitutive.
4.3.1 The Divine Thinker
Kant himself brings out the analogy in a discussion of error:
Deviation from the rules of the pure will constitutes the morally evil, and this
arises only when and because other eects of other powers mingle with the oth-
30
erwise pure laws of the will. E.g.: The inclinations and aects. Just in this way,
when foreign powers mingle with the correct laws of the understanding, a mixed
eect arises from the conict of [this with] our judgments based on the laws of
the understanding and reason. (Blomberg Logic, 102, my emphasis)
This quote suggests that deviation from the laws are caused in the same way, which further
suggests that the rst condition for normativity, Error, should be similar in both cases. As
discussed above, the cause of moral error is the inuence of the lower faculties of sensibility
and desire. In the case of logical error, Kant describes the cause as being sought simply
and solely in the unnoticed inuence of sensibility upon the understanding (Jasche Logic,
53-4). So error is only possible through the inuence of some other faculty, which explains
why Kant says that if we had no other power of cognition but the understanding, we would
never err (Jasche Logic, 53). The pure understanding can be thought analogously with the
pure will; thus, we can posit an analogous divine thinker.
The divine thinker always thinks in accordance with the laws of logic; every thought is
still spontaneous, as the understanding is an active faculty, it is just that it always thinks
logically. Kant states that what makes [logical] error possible, then, is illusion, in accordance
with which the merely subjective is confused in judgment with the objective (Jasche Logic,
54); just as we saw in the moral case, the divine thinker will never confuse the subjective
with the objective because the subjective necessarily correlates with the objective. Thus the
laws of logic constitute the thought of the divine thinker, not that of the human thinker, and
because the human thinker is inuenced by other subjective conditions, the logical laws are
normative for the human thinker.
In this way, the laws of logic are normative in relation to the kind of beings that humans
are. As Tolley claims, The highest principles of each sphere (the law of contradiction and
the non-normative correlate of the categorical imperative, respectively) do not represent
prescriptions concerning what an understanding or practical reason should do (and yet
might fail to do), but rather an expression of what these capacities are (in their essence, as
31
I have been calling it) (Tolley (2006, 389)). Thus, the laws of general logic are not essentially
normative, but, it seems, can be seen as normative in relation to the kind of beings that we
are, beings with dierent faculties that work together to create our judgments of the world
around us.
4.3.2 Pure and Applied General Logic
I now nally return to what I identied at the beginning of this essay as the important
distinction in Kants works on logic: pure general logic and applied general logic. The
laws of pure general logic are those that are constitutive of the divine thinkers thought.
However, the laws of general logic, which contains both pure and applied, are those that are
constitutive of the thought of beings that have the same collection of interwoven faculties
that human beings have. In contrast to the laws of pure general logic, the laws of applied
general logic are a representation of the understanding and the rules of its necessary use in
concreto (Critique of Pure Reason, B78/A54). The important point here is that the laws of
applied general logic are a representation of the general laws of logic in application, whereas
the laws of pure general logic are a representation of the very same laws in the abstract.
It is not the case that there are two sets of dierent laws, one set containing those pure
general laws and the other containing those applied general laws. There is one set of laws
that can be represented in two dierent ways. They are not two kinds of logic, but are rather
two dierent representations of the same logic. From this I argue that because the laws of
general logic can be represented either as pure or applied, and pure and applied are under
the umbrella of general logic that Kant makes the normative claim in the Jasche Logic. It
is important here to note that the explicit normative claim comes before Kant distinguishes
between pure general and applied general logics, and, as mentioned much earlier, Kant does
not make any explicit normative claims about logic in the Critique of Pure Reason. This
latter point may be attributed to the fact that right after Kant introduces the distinction
32
between general and particular logics he goes on to distinguish pure general and applied
general logic, bypassing any claims about the nature of general logic more broadly.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant provides the following denition of pure general
logic: A general but pure logic therefore has to do with strictly a priori principles, and is
a canon of the understanding and reason, but only in regard to what is formal in their use
(Critique of Pure Reason, B77/A53). However, given the kind of beings that humans are,
the laws of general logic should be seen as the representation of the understanding working
ideally. Applied general logic, on the other hand, is to be seen as a representation of the
understanding as it is used by human beings:
What I call applied logic . . . is thus a representation of the understanding and the
rules of its necessary use in concreto, namely under the contingent conditions of
the subject, which can hinder or promote this use, and which can only be given
empirically. It deals with attention, its hindrance and consequences, the cause of
error, the condition of doubt, of reservation, of conviction, etc., and general and
pure logic is related to it as pure morality, which contains merely the necessary
moral laws of a free will in general, is related to the doctrine of virtue proper,
which assesses these laws under the hindrances of the feelings, inclinations, and
passions to which human beings are more or less subject. (Critique of Pure
Reason, B78/A54)
Applied general logic, it is important to note, is to be sure general insofar as it concerns
the use of the understanding without regard to the dierence of objects (Critique of Pure
Reason, B77/A53). Here Kant makes it explicit that applied general logic is where we nd
the cause of error. Thus, it seems that in any explanation of the normativity of the laws of
logic, the laws of applied general logic will play an important role. However, in the Critique
nothing more is said regarding the normativity of logic, which is why I now turn to the
Jasche Logic.
It is important to reiterate the structure of the rst section in the Jasche Logic, which
is titled On Logic In General, as understanding how Kant sets up his discussion of logic is
crucial for my interpretation. The section begins with a broad discussion of how everything
33
in nature, both lifeless and in the living world, takes place according to rules, (Jasche
Logic, 11) and then goes on to conclude that the faculty of understanding, which is itself
the source of rules, must also be guided by rules of its ownthe laws of logic. Then Kant
goes on to characterize the laws of general logic as that science of the necessary laws of the
understanding and of reason in general (Jasche Logic, 13), by providing ve descriptions
of the nature of general logic. First, he explains that general logic is to be taken as the
propaedutic to all use of the understanding. Second, these laws cannot be used in the
creation of knowledge; the laws of logic are to be used as a universal art of reason for
making cognitions in general conform to the form of the understanding in general . . . which
serves of course merely for passing judgment and for correcting our cognition, but not for
expanding it (Jasche Logic, 13). This second point is interesting, as the laws of pure general
logic can be seen as those from which we pass judgment on our cognition, while those of
applied general logic can be seen as those with which we learn how to correct our cognition.
Given that Kant has not specied any distinction within general logic, this explanation
makes sense.
8
The third point is the most important in light of our discussion, as this is where the
already much discussed explicit normative statement is found. The rst paragraph states
that the laws of general logic, as a canon of the understanding, must contain nothing but
laws a priori, which are necessary and have to do with the understanding in general (Jasche
Logic, 14). Here I interpret Kant as saying that insofar as general logic provides a complete
list of those necessary conditions for thought, we must consider these laws as pure. In the
next paragraph he makes the normative claims:
In logic, however, the question is not about contingent but about necessary rules;
not how we do think, but how we ought to think. The rules of logic must thus
be derived not from the contingent but the necessary use of the understanding
8
I will not go into the details from the fourth and fth descriptions, as they are not relevant to the
discussion at hand.
34
. . . In logic we do not want to know how the understanding is and does think and
how it has previously proceeded in thought, but rather how it ought to proceed
in thought. Logic is to teach us the correct use of the understanding, i.e., that
in which it agree with itself. (Jasche Logic, 14)
At this point we must recall our discussion of the ought and imperatives in the section on
the moral law. On Kants account, the ought can only be used in relation to imperfect
beings. If the laws of general logic tell us how we ought to think, then there is a way to
represent these laws from a non-pure standpoint. If this was not the case, if these laws could
only be represented as pure then the human thinker would be the divine thinker and the
ought would not apply. Thus, I take this quote to putting forth the relational interpretation
of normativity as I have been discussing it above. Because humans are beings that possess
many dierent faculties which often interfere with one another, the laws of general logic both
provide the laws that govern the pure thinker, as well as provide a way of how to use those
laws to best guide our thought in the correct manner.
After this section on logic in general follows the section titled Principal Divisions of
Logic, which is where we nd the pure/applied distinction. Here Kant states:
In pure logic we separate the understanding from the other powers of the mind
and consider what it does by itself alone. Applied logic considers the understand-
ing insofar as it is mixed with the other powers of the mind which inuence its
actions and misdirect it . . . In the end it admittedly says what one ought to do in
order to make correct use of the understanding under various subjective obstacles
and restrictions; and we can also learn from it what furthers the correct use of
the understanding, the means of aiding it, or the cures for logical mistakes and
errors. (Jasche Logic, 18)
Within the umbrella of general logic we nd these two ways of considering the laws of
general logic; one provides the constitutive laws for the pure understanding, and another
that takes these pure laws and relates them to the understanding of an imperfect being. I
claim that this talk of representing the laws as pure and applied is illustrated further when
35
taken analogously to the noumenal/phenomenal distinction discussed earlier in this essay.
9
4.4 Pure and Applied as Noumenal and Phenomenal
The laws of general logic can thus be considered noumenally or phenomenally, and, I ar-
gue, in his works on logic Kant uses the terminology of pure and applied towards this end.
Considered noumenally the laws of general logic are seen as constituting the faculty of un-
derstanding, and thus the laws of general logic are constitutive of or essential for the use of
the understanding. Although we are not constituted like the divine thinker, we do identify
ourselves with the workings of the understanding, and when we consider our capacity for
thought as abstracted away from our other capacitiesfrom the noumenal standpointwe
see ourselves as having the capacity for this perfection. And because this capacity for thought
is part of our constitution, every thought is guided by the laws of general logic. However,
we are also aware of the fact that we are fallible. We recognize this from our experience,
and we are aware that there are things that get in the way of our capacity for thought to
work perfectly. Thus, in thought there are other inuences that eect the product of the
thought processsometimes we forget something pertinent, our minds can go blank, we get
distracted by a sensation, etc. All of these eects occur because we are also constituted such
that from the phenomenal standpoint our faculties are pushed and pulled by the lower fac-
ulties. When we consider our thought as being aected by these inuences, we can analyze
the thought as represented through the lens of applied general logic.
And although these general laws of logic constitute thought such that we are beings
with the faculty of understanding, which actively imposes its laws on the action of thought,
these laws of general logic are also normative when we consider the relationship between the
pure laws and the kind of beings that we actually areimperfect ones. Because we can also
9
I again direct the reader to Appendix A for a more in-depth discussion of the two standpoints as described
in Kants Transcendental Idealism as found in the Critique of Pure Reason. I will be referencing the appendix
in the following section.
36
consider these laws from the phenomenal standpoint, and because we are beings that possess
lower faculties, these laws become normative in application; when we consider our thought
from this phenomenal standpoint we see how these laws play the role of an imperative in our
thought processes. The laws of applied general logic are those that take into account the
interference from the sensibility and other faculties that may derail the understanding.
How does this solve the problem? The original problem is that Kant seems to say that
the laws of logic are normative for thought while also being constitutive for thought, which
results in the inability to err, which then results in these laws not being normative. Just to
reiterate the issue as stated at the beginning of the essay, Kant makes the following claims:
(N) The laws of logic are normative for thought. (Jasche Logic, 14)
(ES) There are laws of logic which are essential for the act of thought. (Jasche Logic, 13)
(V) A law that is essential for the activity of the understanding (or any faculty by itself)
cannot be violated. (Vienna Logic, 824)
And we also want to hold that
(ER) For a law to be normative, it must be possible to violate it in some way. In other
words, an ought implies can err.
The interpretation I have just provided makes sense of all of these claims. The laws of logic
are normative for thought because, given the kind of beings that we are, all of our thought
is eected by the relation between the noumenal and phenomenal standpoints. The laws of
logic are essential for thought insofar as we consider them only viewing them as pure, or
strictly from the noumenal standpoint; it follows from this that insofar as we are considering
the understanding from the noumenal standpoint, the understanding cannot err. This makes
perfect sense because we are, in taking up the noumenal standpoint, abstracting away from
all possible interference. However, in the act of thought this interference is present, which
is why the laws of logic become normative for beings like us. These same laws, when taken
up from the phenomenal standpoint, can be violated because it is possible for interference
37
to derail the use of the understanding. Thus, this interpretation makes sense of all of the
desired claims, while removing the seemingly contradictory conclusion.
These laws, when considered as general, meet the two conditions for a law to be a norm.
First, it is possible to err. This is because we can represent the laws as applied, and in
application the human thinker can fail to adhere to the laws. Second, the human subject
identies herself with the laws of logic because she is a thinking being. All of human thought
is guided by the laws of the understanding. In this way the interpretation also makes sense
of the active or spontaneous role that the laws of logic play in the use of the understanding.
Because the human thinker can consider her own faculty of understanding from the noumenal
standpoint, as pure general logic, she views herself as a law-giving being, one that imposes
the laws of pure general logic onto all of the thought that she has. Thus, when considering
these laws in relation to her phenomenal being, she uses these laws of general logic as a
guide to correct thought. The laws of applied general logic are described by Kant in this
way; these laws further the correct use of the understanding, the means of aiding it, or the
cures for logical mistakes and errors (Jasche Logic, 18). In light of the relationship between
the noumenal and phenomenal standpoints, the laws of general logic provide the norms for
correct thought, and because the human thinker identies herself with these laws from the
noumenal standpoint these laws take on an active role in the entire thought process.
5 Conclusion
It is important to realize what Kant has achieved. As human beings we have these intuitions.
We feel that our thought is necessarily constituted, or necessarily guided by, certain laws; yet
we also feel that we fail to adhere to these laws. We identify ourselves as logical beings that
have the capacity for illogical thought. What Kant has done is recognize that as human beings
we have these two intuitions about the nature of logical laws. And on my interpretation,
38
Kant has both reconciled the intuitions, and explained why we have them both.
In closing, I want to bring up a deep skeptical problem with this project. It may be the
case that we possess both the noumenal and phenomenal standpoints in a way that reconciles
the apparent contradiction between them. Does this show that the laws of logic are indeed
normative for thought? What if the relation between these standpoints leaves us stuck with
the illusion of normativity, without any genuine normativity behind the illusion? I have not
addressed this problem, and I do think it is inescapable. We do not yet know whether it is
true that both intuitions are right. What I have done is try to show how it could be possible.
39
A Appendix: Kants Transcendental Idealism
The goal of this appendix is to briey explain Kants description of our cognitive capacities
in terms of faculties, as well as the doctrine of transcendental idealism, which he famously
posits in the Critique of Pure Reason in order to emphasize the importance of the two stand-
points, which is used in the body of this essay to explain the distinction between pure and
applied general logic. There have been volumes upon volumes published on the transcenden-
tal psychology and transcendental idealism, thus my goal is not to argue conclusively for any
one viewpoint. Rather I will explain those basic distinctions required for my discussion, as
well as clarify those particular views that I deem required for my argument. Although much
of the content of this section has been either assumed or made explicit in sections of the
body of this essay, my goal is now to illustrate how all of these discussions come together,
and how I am interpreting them.
A.1 Cognitive Faculties and the Discursivity Thesis
Kant claims that there are two basic cognitive faculties, which he calls the sensibility and the
understanding.
10
The former, sensibility, can be thought of as the passive, sensory faculty
which takes in objects of experience, and the latter, understanding, can be thought of as
our active, conceptual faculty, which conceptualizes and produces thought about the objects
of experience. The sensibility is in charge of our sensible intuitions and the understanding,
our concepts. Both an intuition and a concept are required for cognition; as Kant states,
Thoughts without content are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind ((Kant,
1999a, Critique of Pure Reason, B75/A51)). Intuition is thought of as the content, or matter,
of thought and the concept is to be thought of as the form of thought.
10
For Kant, several other sub-faculties, such as the imagination, the faculty of judgment, and the faculty
of reason, play a part in cognition. I will not go into detail about the nature of these other faculties. Please
note, however, that the interaction of all the cognitive faculties is required for a full understanding of the
cognitive process. I will discuss the relevant faculties throughout the paper when necessary.
40
This dual nature of all cognition is described by Henry Allison (2004) as the discur-
sivity thesis, described as follows: to claim that human cognition is discursive is to claim
that it requires both concepts and sensible intuition. Without the former there would be
no thought and, therefore, no cognition; without the latter there would be nothing to be
thought (Allison (2004, 13)). An important aspect of the discursivity of cognition is that
the sensibility is a passive faculty, meaning that it is receptive, resulting from an aection
of the mind by objects (Allison (2004, 14)), and the understanding is active, meaning that
it takes sensible data and acts on it in some way, specically it orders the data according
to logical laws. The passive/active distinction is described by Robert Hanna in the follow-
ing way: A cognitive faculty is spontaneous [or active] in that whenever it is externally
stimulated by raw unstructured sensory data as inputs, it then automatically organizes or
synthesizes those data in an unprecedented way relative to those inputs, thereby yielding
novel structured cognitions as outputs (Hanna (2009, 3)). The laws of logic, because they
govern all use of the understanding, are the laws that govern all acts of this spontaneous
structuring activity. The full thrust of transcendental idealism can only be understood once
the discursivity thesis is explained; it is important to realize that there must be sensible
data for the understanding to organize conceptually, and also that this sensible data must
be presented to the understanding in the correct way.
Crudely described, Kants doctrine of transcendental idealism claims that our cognition
does not conform to the objects we cognize, rather the objects conform to our cognitive
facultiesKants Copernican Revolution. We can understand transcendental idealism as
the conjunction of two theses:
(CO) Cognitive Idealism: All the proper objects of human cognition are nothing but mind-
dependent sensory appearances or phenomena, not things-in-themselves or noumena
(Critique of Pure Reason, A369).
(RT) Representational Transcendentalism All representations and their contents conform
to the structures imposed on them by our innate spontaneous cognitive capacities
41
(Critique of Pure Reason, Bxvi, A11/B25)
11
Our cognitions must, as he explains, follow the form of sensibility and understanding. Alli-
son illuminates this when he states that transcendental idealism does not merely relativize
the concept of an object to the conditions (whatever they may be) of the representation of
objects, it also species these conditions by means of an analysis of the discursive nature of
human cognition (Allison (2004, 12)). Thus, there are necessary conditions for cognition
that are provided by the nature of our faculties of sensibility and understanding. These con-
ditions on the representation of objects are subjective insofar as they reect the structure of
the human mind, and yet they are also conditions for the objectivity of these representations.
This leads to the distinction between thing-in-themselves, or noumena, and appearances, or
phenomena; because all of our experiences must conform to this subjective structuring, all
of our experiences can only be thought of as appearances. The nature of this distinction has
been the subject of much criticism and scholarly debate, and exactly how we are to think of
the nature of phenomena and noumena is discussed in the next section.
A.2 The Two-Aspects Interpretation
To make sense of Kants distinction within general logic, I want to accept some version of
Henry Allisons interpretation, as stated in his book Transcendental Idealism: An Inter-
pretation and Defense. There he claims that transcendental idealism should be taken as a
work of epistemology that discusses epistemic conditions, not a doctrine of metaphysics that
discusses ontological conditions:
Transcendental idealism must be characterized as a metaphilosophical stand-
point, rather than, as is usually done, as a metaphysical doctrine about the
nature or ontological status of the objects of human cognition. (Allison (2004,
35))
11
This description of transcendental idealism is found in Hanna (2009, 36).
42
According to this alternative understanding, which is usually termed the double-
aspect or two-aspect view, Kants transcendental distinction is primarily be-
tween two ways in which things (empirical objects) can be considered at the
metalevel of philosophical reection (transcendental reection) rather than be-
tween the kinds of thing that are considered. Things can be considered either as
they appear, that is, as they are in relation to the subjective conditions of hu-
man cognition, or as they are in themselves, independently of these conditions.
(Allison (1990, 3))
The metaphysical interpretation leads to what is known as the two-worlds interpretation,
while the epistemological interpretation leads to the two-aspects interpretation. I will now
briey discuss the advantages of the latter interpretation.
If we take Kant to be making metaphysical claims then we end up with two kinds, or
worlds, of objectsobjects as they are in-themselves, and objects as they appear to us. Given
cognitive idealism the objects we experience can only ever be appearances because our expe-
riences are always shaped, in some way, by the conditions of our cognitive faculties. Thus, we
can never know anything about, or have any interaction with, things-in-themselves. There
are numerous problems
12
that such an interpretation entails which are discussed throughout
the literature. For one, it is not clear how the noumenal and phenomenal worlds are con-
nected, even though the noumenal objects are supposed to be the cause of the phenomenal
objects. Issues such as these have led some critics to attempt to save Kant from himself,
by separating what they take to be a legitimate core of the Kantian argument . . . from the
excess baggage of transcendental idealism, with which they believe it to be encumbered
(Allison (2004, 3)).
Allison claims that Kantian arguments and transcendental idealism are necessarily inter-
twined and that in order to save Kant, we must come up with an interpretation that makes
sense of transcendental idealism. His interpretation is as follows:
An epistemologically based understanding of transcendental idealism [which] re-
12
See P.F. Strawsons book The Bounds of Sense (1966) for the most well-known account of the problems
that follow from the two-worlds interpretation.
43
quires that the transcendental distinction between appearances and things in
themselves be understood as holding between two ways of considering things (as
they appear and as they are in themselves) rather than as, on the more tradi-
tional reading, between two ontologically distinct sets of entities (appearances
and things in themselves). (Allison (2004, 16))
The conditions for cognition that stem from the structuring of our minds by the faculties
of sensibility and understanding are thus supposed to be taken as conditions for thinking
of the objects of experience as fully objective because the necessary conditions imposed by
the faculties are a priori epistemic conditions. Thus the necessary conditions imposed on
experience of the structure of our minds do not determine the existence of the object, rather
they determine how we think about the world. Accordingly, in considering things as they
appear, we are considering them in the way in which they are presented to discursive knowers
with our forms of sensibility. Conversely, to consider them as they are in themselves is to
consider them apart from their epistemic relation to these forms or epistemic conditions,
which, if it is to have any content, must be equivalent to considering them qua objects
for some pure intelligence or mere understanding (Allison (2004, 17)). The phenomenal
standpoint, then, is a way of thinking about the world in light of the conditions that govern
our sensible capacity; it is from this standpoint that our cognition contains form and content.
And the noumenal standpoint is the way of thinking about the world as abstracted from any
sensory input whatsoever, leaving us with the form, so to speak, of experience.
For my interpretation it is important that the noumenal and phenomenal be two aspects
of one thingthought. However, these standpoints should not be taken as mere meta-
philosophical standpoints, only existing when we step back and reect on our actual thought.
It is the case that we do reect on our thought, which is how we end up understanding the
specic laws that guide our thought as both pure and applied. In the act of thinking both
the noumenal and phenomenal standpoints are aecting the thought process. An act of
thought for a human being is constituted in such a way that the understanding implements
44
the laws of logic, which involves the interaction of the understanding with other faculties
which may interfere with that working. The understandings activity constitutes, for human
beings, the noumenal standpoint, while the workings of the lower faculties constitutes the
phenomenal standpoint. Human beings thought is constituted by both the noumenal and
the phenomenal standpoints.
45
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